To the editor:
A few very short years ago, Dallas County Secondary Roads spent $3 million to reconstruct and repave F31 from Minburn to R22.
Today, if you drive that stretch of road, you had better plan on rattling the teeth out of your head or at least replacing the shocks and struts in your vehicle as the road has cracked, heaved and is in very rough shape.
How could the product of a $3 million road project less than six years old already have deteriorated to this extent, and what is Dallas County Secondary Roads planning to do in order to address this?
Additionally, take a drive on some of the gravel roads along the Raccoon River between Perry and Adel, and admire the butcher job that was recently completed (presumably because there hasn’t been enough snow to clear?) by the Secondary Roads Department in the woodlands along the road.
While some clearing was probably needed, a number of very large, mature trees that were probably not really a problem were haphazardly cut down with no apparent rhyme or reason.
The work was shoddy, with some logs hauled away but others left behind, stumps of all different heights left to eventually rot, damage to fence lines evident along with piles of limbs and other material still littering the right of way and even worse places where the ground was left exposed, waiting for the first gully washer of the spring to erode way steeps banks along the road.
Who is keeping the county engineer and roads department in check? Outcomes like this make me question the competence of those administering the Dallas County Secondary Roads Department.
We should expect our tax dollars and public ground to be stewarded much better than this!
J. D. Stufflebeam
Perry
